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Interpreted logical forms as objects of the attitudes

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Abstract

Two arguments favoring propositionalist accounts of attitude sentences are being revisited: the Church-Langford translation argument and Thomason's argument against quotational theories of indirect discourse. None of them proves to be decisive, thus leaving the option of searching for a developed quotational alternative. Such an alternative is found in an interpreted logical form theory of attitude ascription. The theory differentiates elegantly among different attitudes but it fails to account for logical dependencies among them. It is argued, however, that the concept of logical consequence does not well apply to dependencies among belief sentences and that the requirement to account for logical relations among such sentences should be relaxed.

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For helpful criticism and comments on a thesis out of which grew this paper I whish to thank Max Cresswell, Manfred Frank, Fritz Hamm, Herbert Keuth, Richard Larson, Peter Ludlow, David Macauley, Ruth Manor, Gabriel Segal, Gianfranco Soldati, Arnim v. Stechow and some anonymous referees. Special thanks to James Higginbotham. Of course none of the above mentioned can be held responsible for any shortcomings of this paper. Comments, critique, and complaints send to dusche@mailserv.zdv.uni-tuebingen.de.

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Dusche, M. Interpreted logical forms as objects of the attitudes. J Logic Lang Inf 4, 301–315 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01049472

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